If you want to work at the San Francisco-based start-up Wibidata, you’ll first have to conquer the puzzles in a series of custom-made Portal 2 levels, designed to look like Wibidata’s own offices.
Bonus link, from 2011: The Portal 2 wedding proposal.
Welcome to the third installment of PuzzleNation Book Reviews!
All of the books discussed and/or reviewed in PNBR articles are either directly or indirectly related to the world of puzzling, and hopefully you’ll find something to tickle your literary fancy in this entry or the entries to come.
Let’s get started!
Our book review post this time around features Parnell Hall’s novel The Puzzle Lady vs. the Sudoku Lady.
Cora Felton is known far and wide as the Puzzle Lady, powerhouse puzzlemaker and occasional crimesolver, but her reign may be over. Minami, the Sudoku Lady, has come from Japan to challenge Cora for pride, PR, and puzzle-bragging rights. But when dead bodies start turning up and Minami is fingered as the culprit, it’s up to Cora to clear the competition’s good name.
Now, before I get into the review, it’s confession time. This is the second time around for me with this book. I read it a few years ago, and didn’t particularly enjoy it. But I was also sick as a dog at the time, so I wanted to be sure that my general foul mood at the time didn’t impair my ability to appreciate what I was reading at the time.
Turns out my illness had nothing to do with it.
The Puzzle Lady vs. the Sudoku Lady is part of Parnell Hall’s Puzzle Lady Mystery series — which he’s been publishing at the rate of a book a year since 2000 — and I sincerely hope it’s not indicative of the rest of the series. The reader plows through a needlessly convoluted story, confronted by a population of unpleasant characters and a protagonist who is unlikable in the extreme. She’s more grating than curmudgeonly.
Now, to be fair, that’s not to say that bright spots in the novel don’t exist. Hall has a natural adeptness with wordplay and his nigh-Vaudevillian exchanges of dialogue are engaging. Sadly, however, both are severely undermined by the unsympathetic cast of characters.
The sudoku and crossword puzzles included within are both an interesting gimmick and a pleasant treat; my own penchant for puzzling would not be ignored, and I solved each puzzle as it appeared. Unfortunately, those were calm spots in an otherwise stormy narrative.
I must conclude that The Puzzle Lady vs. the Sudoku Lady is at best an uneven reading experience. (Though I might try another Puzzle Lady Mystery someday, for curiosity’s sake.)
Well, I hope you enjoyed the latest installment of PuzzleNation Book Reviews, and I look forward to more book discussions in the future. In the meantime, keep calm, puzzle on, and I’ll catch you later.
Association is a powerful force when it’s time to give gifts. If someone doesn’t know what to get you, the mind immediately turns to what that person associates you with.
For instance, I’m a fairly rabid Star Wars fan, and have been ever since I was little. Friends and family know they can rarely go wrong giftwise when it comes to interesting Star Wars swag.
(So says the proud owner of TWO Star Wars LEGO alarm clocks. Oh yes, I can choose between light side and dark side wake-ups, since I have both Anakin Skywalker or Darth Vader. Jealous?)
That kind of association can be a real treat, since you might receive a wholly unexpected and very welcome present simply because someone associated you with a neat little trinket or object.
The reason I bring this up, especially in January, is because my sister couldn’t make it home for Christmas, so we had a late holiday celebration for her last week. And when she and I exchanged gifts, she surprised me with the following bit of puzzly delightfulness…
Oh yes, the perfect time-keeping accoutrement for my burgeoning Puzzle Lair. (Things just sound cooler when you make them mildly supervillainous.)
And best of all? I had no idea these even existed until I received one as a gift.
So, thanks Sis, and thank you, Association. You’ve hooked me up with sweet swag once again.
Fellow puzzlers, I must apologize. Over the last few months, I’ve attempted to cover as wide a swathe of the puzzling community as possible in my blog posts, but I failed.
Make no mistake, I’ve done a pretty decent job of it, exploring everything from puzzle tattoos and Halloween costumes to brainteasers both new and old, from puzzle references in movies and TV to writing clues and book reviews.
But I’ve managed to neglect an entire sector of the puzzle-loving community: non-human puzzlers.
Oh yes, I’ve been unintentionally speciesist, and that stops today. Let’s take a look at Earth’s other great puzzle-solving creature: the octopus.
Think I’m kidding? Hardly.
Scientists have repeatedly found that octopuses can solve mazes, remember solutions, and apply past experience to new puzzles. They are infinitely curious and adaptable puzzle solvers in their own right.
In fact, some researchers have taken to offering what are known as “prey puzzles” to octopuses in captivity in order to study how they learn, as well as their dexterity, both mental and physical.
From locked boxes to screw-top jars and bottles, prey puzzles have all been solved with relative ease by octopuses. (In fact, Lucy the Puzzle-Solving Octopus — which should really be a children’s book or a kids’ TV series — has been the subject of several articles.)
True, they’re not exactly solving Rubik’s Cubes or decoding cryptograms, but they do impressive mechanical puzzle-solving for a species lacking thumbs, don’t you think?
So, it is with deep regret that I apologize to the octopus community for ignoring your puzzle-solving skills for so long. It shan’t happen again, I assure you.
And now, as a final act of contrition, I give you the following video, featuring a poorly-filmed octopus solving a fairly simple prey puzzle in under two minutes. Enjoy!
More than a few people have asked me how I became a puzzler. What strange, meandering road led me to the hallowed halls of puzzlesmithery? Could aspiring puzzlers follow the same path to puzzlewonderful adventures?
There’s no single path to puzzlerhood. Sure, there are some fairly universal commonalities. Do you have a great vocabulary? Mad trivia skills? Are you a whiz with palindromes, anagrams, or other forms of wordplay? These can all help. Also, a background or degree in English doesn’t hurt.
But every puzzler I know took a different route. It’s not as if we all one day awoke to a knock at the door, only to discover a small basket left on the doorstep, and tiny elfin footprints leading back toward the enchanted forest down the street.
Though, admittedly, that would have been awesome.
Here, let me take you through some of the highlights in my puzzle resume, and we’ll see if my experiences offer some guidance or inspiration for those with puzzletastic aspirations.
Unrecognized Wheel of Fortune Grand Champion, USA, 1988-present
Since I was about seven years old, family members have called me into the family room to see who can puzzle out the quotes, phrases, and punny answers behind the lovely Vanna White, and I regularly school both contestants and kin with ease. While Mr. Sajak refuses to recognize my two decade reign as Wheel of Fortune Grand Champion (Stay-at-Home Division), that doesn’t make it any less noteworthy.
Internship with the Riddler, Gotham City, 2000-2001
There are few puzzle personalities in the world with the flair, cachet, and renown of Edward Nigma, otherwise known as freelance detective and occasional criminal mastermind The Riddler. So when I had the opportunity to sit in with him and learn from his decades of riddle-centric shenaniganry, I leapt at the chance.
I studied the intricacies of mechanical puzzles, wordplay, and punsmithery while under Nigma’s wing, and although I frequently found myself in legal and moral gray areas — and on the receiving end of more than a few POW!s and BIFF!s — the experience was well worth it.
Tetris Foreign Exchange Program, St. Petersberg, 2002
There’s no better spacial awareness training than Tetris — I can feng shui the packages in the back of a UPS truck like nobody’s business, and don’t get me started on my legendary vacation-packing skills — and with the addition of that horrendous tension-inducing “you’re near the top!” music, I’m cool as Siberia under pressure.
Puzzle Summit with Will Shortz, New York City, 2007
Okay, it wasn’t so much a historic meeting-of-the-minds as it was me yelling puzzle ideas at him with a megaphone as I chased him down the street. But that totally counts.
Freelance Puzzle Historian, Self-Appointed, USA, 2009-present
Oh yes, puzzle history is a rich and varied field of study, one to which I have devoted a great deal of time and effort, unearthing some fascinating and surprising discoveries. For instance, did you know that Nero did not, in fact, fiddle while Rome burned? He was far too busy being frustrated by the extreme Sudoku puzzle he’d picked up in the marketplace.
PuzzleNation Citizen, PuzzleNation, 2011-present
Yes, I was granted full citizenship in PuzzleNation, with all rights and responsibilities that entails. (Like walking the Diggin’ Words dogs and such.)
Well, there you have it. A brief glimpse in my particular puzzle experiences and how they’ve shaped me. Here’s hoping you can blaze your own puzzlerific trail, be it through decoding Linear B with Cryptogram-ingrained proficiency or anagramming your friends’ names to your heart’s content.
Good luck, and in the meantime, keep calm, puzzle on, and I’ll catch you next time.
ETAOIN SHRDLU!
If that looks like something other than gibberish to you, then you might be a puzzle person — specifically, a puzzler who has solved your share of cryptograms. (Or played PuzzleNation’s Guessworks.) Those twelve letters are the most commonly used in the English language… or so it was widely thought for a very long time.
The original frequency list was put together by a researcher named Mark Mayzner back in 1965. The English language has surely drifted around a bit in the last fifty years — perhaps it was time to revise the list. Furthermore, computing power has improved somewhat since the mid-sixties. Mayzner’s famous list was based on just 20,000 words; a new look would obviously cast a much wider net.
And that is why Mayzner, now 85 years old, contacted Peter Norvig of Google. Using Google Books and the research tool Ngrams, Norvig redid Mayner’s work, but on a grand scale, analyzing 97,565 distinct words, which were collectively used in books over 743 billion times. That breaks down to over 3.5 trillion letters. Norvig sorted them for frequency and — whoa! We have a new list!
ETAOIN SRHLDCU!
Mayzner’s low-tech effort holds up pretty well — we don’t see any variation for the first seven letters. After that, things change a little: I always suspected R was getting short shrift compared to H. I’m not too surprised to see L edge out D, either. And U must be bummed to have slipped a place. “I’m a vowel!” you hear him cry. “I’m just as important as E or A! Do you hear me?!”
Peter Norvig’s full report, with lots more fascinating trivia about letter and word usage, can be read here.
Update: The original frequency list apparently pre-dates Mayzner.
PuzzCulture 